Lest you think this is entirely a new attitude amongst the left, recall this New Yorker flashback to the Vietnam War era. “Punch” Sulzberger, who had published the Times from 1963 through 1992, and whose family has controlled the New York Times since the late 19th century, served with distinction as a Marine in the Pacific Theater in WWII and as an officer during the Korean War. His son on the other hand…

[Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr.] had been something of a political activist in high school—he had been suspended briefly from Browning for trying to organize a shutdown of the school following the National Guard’s shooting of students at Kent State—and at Tufts he eagerly embraced the antiwar movement. His first arrest for civil disobedience took place outside the Raytheon Company, a defense and space contractor: there, dressed in an old Marine jacket of Punch’s, he joined other demonstrators who were blocking the entrance to the company’s gates. He was soon arrested again, in an antiwar sit-in at the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston.

Punch had showed little reaction after the first arrest, but when he got word of the second one he flew to Boston. Over dinner, he asked his son why he was involved in the protests and what kind of behavior the family might expect from him in the future. Arthur assured his father that he was not planning on a career of getting himself arrested. After dinner, as the two men walked in the Boston Common, Punch asked what his son later characterized as “the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life”: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” Arthur answered, “I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country; we shouldn’t be there.” To the elder Sulzberger, this bordered on traitor’s talk. “How can you say that?” he yelled. Years later, Arthur said of the incident, “It’s the closest he’s ever come to hitting me.”

Pinch and the rest of the MSM haven’t exactly matured much since the Woodstock era. As Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon wrote of the Times in a 2014 piece titled “Fast Times at Eighth Avenue High,” “The next time our reporters and producers and anchors and bloggers affect an air of moral or social superiority, the next time they pretend to know the answers to every political and economic and cultural question, remember this: They are basically teenagers.”

And regarding their adolescent rage, and that of the non-media wing of the Democrat Party, as Glenn has written, “Trump, as I keep saying, is a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”

The Lincoln United Methodist Church is a sanctuary church and according to Gutierrez’s website, he “spoke to a packed house about the need to defend DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and other forms of legal immigration status that are under attack from Republicans and Donald Trump.”

Gutierrez said that while Trump is attempting to criminalize immigrants, the president is the “real criminal.” The Congressman said illegal immigrants are not criminals and that history will determine who the true criminals are.

“For me, the major criminal that exists in the United States of America is called Donald Trump, he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House,” Gutierrez said to the congregation. “And we’re going to take actions today, and we’re going to take actions tomorrow. And there will soon be a majority in the House of Representatives, and I’m going to make sure that I am there to make sure of one thing, that we write those articles of impeachment and take him to trial before the Senate and eliminate him as president of the United States of America.”

I’m so old I can remember when eliminationist rhetoric was an incitement to violence.

THE NEW REPUBLIC, IN DEFENSE OF DISINVITING ‘HATEFUL’ SPEAKERS. At Hot Air,John Sexton writes:

It has been a banner day for progressives who want to redefine our notions of free speech. Earlier today Allahpundit wrote about Howard Dean’s dubious argument that free speech doesn’t protect “hate speech.” Then Jazz Shaw wrote about a piece published by the New York Times which argues free speech should be restricted for the public good. For the third part of this hat trick, I direct your attention to the New Republic where Assistant Professor of English Aaron Hanlon has a piece titled, “Why Colleges Have a Right to Reject Hateful Speakers Like Ann Coulter.”

The New Republic is altering the deal. Pray they don’t alter it any further.

A Pittsburgh coffee shop is brewing up backlash over a loyalty punch card featuring pictures of President Donald Trump and other conservatives.

Black Forge Coffee House owner Nick Miller says the satiric cards are meant to express frustration with the system and nothing more. However, critics complain the punch holes make it look like the politicos have been shot in the forehead.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: “There are plenty of images NYT could have used for this headline that didn’t involve Stephen Miller’s head on a spike. This is just in seriously bad taste, imagine if Breitbart or another more conservative outlet had posted an image of say Valerie Jarrett’s head on a spike.”

After opening the rant with, “F**k white supremacy. F**k the U.S. empire” the speaker attacks capitalism. “You know what America thrives off of? Capitalism,” the speaker says, adding, “We use our mother=f**king, f**king black and brown bodies to live and survive while white people own f**king properties after that.” But the speaker has a solution for this problem, “So you know what we need to do? We need to start giving f**king money.” The rant continues, “White people, give your f**king money, your f**king house, your f**king property, we need it f**king all. You need to reparate black and indigenous people right now.”

A minute or so later, the speaker takes it up a notch saying, “And we need to stark killing people. First off, we need to start killing the White House. The White House must die.”

This pre-school teacher wants to violently overthrow our government and our economy, in the name of Black Lives Matter. What a great message to be giving to the next generation, let alone to share on the internet. She screamed, “F**k white supremacy, f**k the U.S. empire, f**k your imperialist a** lives. That s**t gotta go.” She also yelled, “We need to start killing people. First off, we need to start killing the White House. The White House must die. The White House, your f**king White House, your f**king Presidents, they must go!”

I remember when “eliminationist rhetoric” was considered bad by the left, instead of aspirational. More here.

Rialto, California, held a regularly scheduled city council meeting last Tuesday after a city councilman apologized for planning an event to discuss the possibility of Rialto becoming a “sanctuary city.”

Luis Nolasco, a community engagement and policy advocate for the ACLU of Southern California, stood up to speak at the city council meeting and attacked many of the white people present, saying they are not actual residents of Rialto.

Nolasco said, “This is my town.”

He said that the important part of the sanctuary city discussion is “who are the people we are talking about.”

The ACLU official said that “the people in this room are not representative of Rialto. Sorry to break it, but growing up here white people were the minority.”

“The reality is that black and Latinos are the majority of the city, and that is representative of the city, and that’s going to continue to be the case for future generations,” Nolasco, 26, added.

The city of Rialto is 72.4 percent Latino, according to a 2015 Census estimate.

“It’s kind of mean for me to say it but these people have probably like five years left,” Nolasco said while gesturing to the white attendees at the meeting. A video of the meeting shows that several of them were elderly.

YOU WENT FULL REICHSTAG, MAN. NEVER GO FULL REICHSTAG: The New Republic on the firebombing of the GOP’s North Carolina HQ:

It’s a rather ironic post, considering that TNR tweeted this during the government “slimdown” in the fall of 2013:

As Jim Geraghty tweeted at the time, “The New Republic: Your first choice for violent, authoritarian, eliminationist rhetoric!” And now conspiracy theories as well. Come back Marty Peretz, all is forgiven!

Sitting in the Mercedes-Benz Lounge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance last month, Leno, leaning on his self-deprecating humor that captivated decades of NBC viewers, singled out Trump. “I think this is the problem with Donald Trump. I don’t think anybody has just ever beaten the crap out of him, so he has this attitude of ‘whatever.’ When you have the crap beat out of you, you learn how to negotiate, you learn how to deal with people,” Leno explains. “You learn that kindness is the greatest virtue you can have.”

I’m old enough to remember when the American left (and Jay has admitted that’s his political worldview) at least pretended to frown upon bullying and eliminationist rhetoric. But then, we live in an era when someone who attempted to assassinate a Republican presidential candidate is let off with two years and deportation. As Glenn wrote earlier this week of Trump’s would-be assassin, it’s “hard to imagine someone who went after Obama or Hillary getting this kind of treatment.” Similarly, it’s impossible to imagine Leno saying that smug leftists such as Obama or Hillary should have the crap beaten out of them. And it’s a particularly fascinating admission given that Leno had Trump on as a guest of the Tonight Showat least ten times without coming to blows.

The timing of Leno’s quote also recalls similar language in the air during the fall of 2008, such as when Reebok decided it would be a good idea to politicize their heretofore apolitical mascot “Terry Tate Office Linebacker,” by issuing a clip in which he’s depicted violently ramming Sarah Palin, that year’s Republican vice presidential nominee, to the ground:

PEOPLE ARE FOCUSING ON THE “BASKET OF DEPLORABLES” LINE — which is an awful line because it’s simultaneously memorable without being evocative — but the worst part of Hillary’s speech was where she called opponents “irredeemable” and “not America.” That’s pretty much eliminationist rhetoric, right there.

The group named the political art project “The Emperor Has No Balls,” inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen tale of an overly confident ruler titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” according to The Washington Post.

“Like it or not, Trump is a larger-than-life figure in world culture at the moment,” an Indecline spokesperson told the newspaper Thursday.

“Looking back in history, that’s how those figures were memorialized and idolized in their time — with statues,” he added.

The artist behind the project, who posted a video of the process, is a Las-Vegas sculptor who goes by Ginger and has extensive experience in creating and designing monsters for horror films and haunted houses.

“When the guys [from INDECLINE] approached me, it was all because of my monster-making abilities,” he told the Post.

“Trump is just yet another monster, so it was absolutely in my wheelhouse to be able to create these monstrosities.”

Also, calling someone a “monster” is eliminationist rhetoric that might lead to violence. Well, unless the target is a Republican, anyway.

“When you keep comparing a candidate to Hitler, you have to expect this sort of thing,” Glenn noted last week when the 19 year old Brit attempted to assassinate Trump, adding that “Hillary, Bernie, and their media myrmidons” are “practically accomplices.”

Reporting from Washington — Law enforcement officials had only begun their examination of a Tucson supermarket scene where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others were shot Saturday when many on the political left settled on a culprit: overheated political rhetoric.

Even before the name of the shooter was known, a fierce debate spilled out across blogs and social media, with liberal commentators blaming the attack on the violent imagery evoked by some “tea party” candidates and conservatives during the recent midterm elections.

They noted that Giffords’ tea party-backed opponent, Jesse Kelly, held a fundraiser at a shooting range in which he invited supporters to “help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” by shooting an M-16 rifle with him. They pointed to an online map Sarah Palin posted during the midterm election that used cross hairs to mark each congressional Democrat she wanted to defeat, along with her frequent use of shooting metaphors on the campaign trail.

—“In Gabrielle Giffords shooting, many on left quick to lay blame,” the Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2011.

Flash-forward to today; L.A. Times editors choose cartoon of Ted Cruz armed with a long-barreled pistol about to duel with an unarmed Donald Trump to illustrate Jonah Goldberg’s latest column for the paper, “How to stop Donald Trump.”

Given that in January of 2011, Michael Hirsh of the left-leaning National Journal appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews and called for, as Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller wrote at the time, “a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” why on earth would the L.A. Times choose such an obviously racist visual metaphor during a heated election year?

And given that, as Glenn asked a few minutes ago, “If Trump Is the One Promoting Violence, Then Why Do So Many Americans Say They Want to Punch Him in the Face?,” why is the Times ratcheting up the eliminationist rhetoric to a whole new level?

A day after he announced he was going to make a film taking on the NRA with Meryl Streep, Harvey Weinstein — the producer of several violent films — told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview to air tonight that he has had a change of heart about violent content in film. Asked by Morgan about his hypocrisy of making these violent films, Weinstein said, “They have a point. You have to look in the mirror, too. I have to choose movies that aren’t violent or as violent as they used to be. I know for me personally, you know, I can’t continue to do that. The change starts here. It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and say this is what I want for my kids and then just go out and be a hypocrite.”

Well, I’d tune in for that — as Red Skelton famously said after all of Hollywood seemed to show up for the 1958 funeral of Harry Cohn, an even more reviled studio head, “It proves what Harry always said: give the public what they want and they’ll come out for it.”

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him. Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?

Read the whole thing.

VDH naturally asks how the media would have responded if GWB had invited a figure this polarizing to the White House, but the current president’s own history is also telling. Recall that in January of 2011 after the Tucson shooting, “Obama [Called] for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics,” as the New York Times described his widely praised speech. Jared Lee Loughner severely wounded a congresswoman, killed or wounded 17 others — and killed a federal judge. And last week, Obama met with someone whose album cover features an image of a judge who had just been murdered. And a media that was once utterly obsessed over “eliminationist rhetoric” and bulls-eye clip-art didn’t lose a moment of sleep.

WHERE HAS THE MEDIA BEEN? HOW CAMPUS CENSORSHIP NEVER WENT AWAY: “Most people are familiar with the supposed heyday of political correctness of the 1980s and ’90s, but there is a popular misconception that speech codes and censorship were defeated in the courts of law and public opinion by the mid-’90s,” my fellow Insta-co-blogger Greg Lukianoff writes at Ricochet. “In reality, the threats to campus speech never went away. Before examining what has changed to alarm the public—rightfully—about the state of open discourse in higher education, it’s important to note what hasn’t changed.”

The media was fine with political correctness and censorship when it mostly being used against the right. But sooner or later, all revolutions eventually devour their own; which is why the MSM woke themselves somewhat from their slumber last year. Or as Kevin Williamson noted when lefty Jonathan Chait issued his widely-disseminated cri de coeur on the dangers political correctness in New York magazine last year, “Chait’s recent critique of political correctness insists that the phenomenon has undergone a resurgence. It hasn’t; contrary to Chait’s characterization, it never went away. The difference is that it is now being used as a cudgel against white liberals such as Jonathan Chait, who had previously enjoyed a measure of immunity.”

Last week, Donald Trump was once again disgusted. Commenting on Hillary Clinton’s awkward bathroom break during the last Democratic debate, he said, “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk.”

It’s not the first time that Trump has been perturbed by a bodily function. As Frank Bruni noted in his New York Timescolumn, Trump has been publicly disgusted by Marco Rubio’s sweat and by the idea of pumping breast milk. Then there was his notorious comment about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, in which he conveyed an almost visceral revulsion: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

The Trump campaign has stunned bemused pundits by growing in strength with every controversy and outrageous policy proposal, like banning foreign Muslims from entering the United States. It has finally forced them to admit that his success comes not despite these things, but because of them.

Washington (CNN) Ted Cruz obtained new ammunition Tuesday to shoot at his favorite bogeyman, the mainstream media, after The Washington Post depicted his two young daughters as monkey-like characters doing the bidding of their father.

Beyond the “monkey-like characters” weasel words, nice eliminationist rhetoric there. This from the network where in January 2011, in the immediate wake of the shooting of Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, Republican-appointed Federal Judge John Roll and 17 others, anchor John King “issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term ‘crosshairs’ during a segment: ‘We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language.'”

Pssst, Democrats — they’re talking about you. A group of pastors in Chicago warned today that the battle for justice after the Laquan McDonald killing would be a political war in which “there are going to be casualties,” and that “friends of ours are going to go down.” They want a petition drive for a call of “no confidence” in Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and they also want the video of another police shooting released. So far, Emanuel’s administration has refused, but the community is organizing protests to push harder:

* * * * * *

That warning about “friends” wasn’t aimed at Rahm Emanuel. It’s aimed at Democrats who might be inclined to circle the wagons to protect him. It’s a warning to the state legislature not to bottle up the recall-election bill introduced this week for the specific purpose of ousting Emanuel. And at least to some degree, it’s a warning to Hillary Clinton to quit supporting the longtime family friend.

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” he said, “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Times Goes Gaga Over Guns. “The Times pretends to be concerned about violence, specifically homicide. Weirdly, however, the editorial fails even to mention the fact that the homicide rate in the U.S. has been steadily falling for some years, to the point where it is at a historic low, only around half what it was in the early 1990s–you remember, the golden age of the Clinton administration.”

Plus: “You can find a lot more sanity at just about any gun range than you can in the New York Times editorial board room.” Yes.

Similarly, while very, very, very few people outside the Times’ offices — and media nerds like me — could care less about what is essentially a P.R. gimmick, the Times thinks this is a Very Big Deal. For the staid grey lady this amounts to shouting “Unleash the Kraken!” It shows you how desperate and frustrated the editors — and liberals generally — are with the fact that this country doesn’t agree with them on guns. It also shows that the “national conversation” most Americans want has more to do with Islamist terrorism and less to do with the alleged “gun show loophole.” This alone doesn’t make The Times’ views or their arguments illegitimate or invalid. But it does illustrate how unpersuasive they are to much of the public.

The same can be said for the disgustingly hypocritical new fad of calling Wayne LaPierre a “terrorist.” This from the same crowd who insisted Sarah Palin had blood on her hands because of some cross-hairs on a congressional district map and that Michelle Bachmann should be put in the dock for her “eliminationist rhetoric.” I have no problem with criticizing LaPierre, but the double standard is just so appalling. I mean, seriously, to Hell with these people.

What’s true for lawyers is also true for newspapers: When you’re shouting and pounding the table, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.

Yes, but it’s also meant to get us talking about guns, instead of Obama’s failure at protecting the country from terrorism.

I got an email about my USA Today column from an angry lefty with the usual “Republicans are a bunch of dying old white people who’ll be gone soon” eliminationist rhetoric. I was tempted to send him this article on the GOP’s takeover of state governments. But I’ll repeat a question I asked earlier: In light of these campus scandals, will we see more, or less, human, financial, and reputational capital flowing to higher education in the future?

The Cocked Fist Culture has turned into an ouroboros, except the snake is well past swallowing its own tail. It’s eaten its way clean up to mid-sternum. Recent books across the political spectrum have extensively documented this turn, notably Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson’s End of Discussion on the right and Kirsten Powers’s The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech on the center-left. Though the outrage industrial complex shows no sign of shrinking, some thought a high-water mark had been reached earlier this year when Jonathan Chait, a New York writer and reliable liberal, broke ranks, accusing his own team of ideological repression through all the thought-and-speech policing. He charged that the hijacked left had adopted the modus operandi of old-line smash-mouth Marxists, who’ve always been contemptuous of mainstream liberalism’s tendency to enshrine dissent. The present left merely swaps Marxist preoccupation with economics for race-and-gender-identity fetishization.

While some on the right gave Chait a swat for sniffily arriving a quarter-century late to the anti-p.c. party, his comrades lined up to steamroll him. Amanda Taub, Vox’s self-described “senior sadness correspondent,” responded that there’s no such thing as political correctness. Even using the term is just a way “to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue,” a device “often used by those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people.” A sentence that sounded suspiciously like it had been written by a political-correctness meme generator. The kind that Orwell described as prose consisting “less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house.”

But the senior sadness correspondent must’ve grown even sadder when several months later, Vox itself ran a piece by a professor bylined Edward Schlosser. He complained of students’ claiming grievous harm over every imagined affront. Of his and his colleagues’ having to adjust their teaching materials so as not to trample the fragile buttercups, for fear of losing their jobs. Of being afraid to teach the likes of Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain at the risk of triggering sensibility-offending IEDs. Of cultural studies and social-justice writers enabling these attitudes in popular media by attempting to make complex fields of study as easily digestible as a TGIF sitcom, which has “led to an adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice.”

The piece’s headline, incidentally, was “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me.” One is tempted to reply to Professor Schlosser (not his real name, he was too afraid to use it): How do you think the rest of us feel? Especially as the students being taught—if “teaching” is actually what happens in the trigger-warned, hermetically sealed safe spaces that higher-education classrooms have become—move into the workforce. There, they can further the debate, which no longer remotely resembles a debate, since a debate is something too unsafe-spacey to have.

In 2008, NBC waited until Obama was securely in place as the Democrat nominee before beginning their search and destroy mission on Hillary. That culminated in Keith Olbermann’s violent eliminationist rhetoric in late April of that year, demanding “Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”

If not Hillary, which Democrat has NBC’s corporate backing this time around?

In addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence, they live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behavior. And, of course, they can produce new life from their own bodies, to which men add only the tiniest biological contribution — and one that soon could be done without. . . . To call being male a syndrome is not an arbitrary judgment.

I know this is just more pro-Hillary battlespace prep — but Hillary herself is the best argument against this gauzy, dishonest thinking. And for that matter, it takes a peculiar sort of person to look at America today and conclude that its problem is too much testosterone.

Plus: “Gilliam’s dystopian 1985 film Brazil ends with Jonathan Pryce’s protagonist being brutally tortured by Michael Palin’s Speer or Eichmann-esque coolly technocratic statist character. Presumably, Pryce’s character dies at the end of the film or shortly afterwards. Who knew until now Gilliam meant it to be a happy ending and the whole film a how-to guide for big government?”

Whenever there is a school shooting, liberals try to capitalize by pushing for more gun control. But a recent story here in Minnesota reinforces a point that we have made before: would-be “shooters” are usually copycats who admire the fame that prior mass murderers have achieved. If we really want to cut down on school shootings, in particular, the most effective measure would be to prohibit news media from reporting on them; or, perhaps, bar them from reporting the name of the shooter.

Considering all of their tut-tutting about civility, eliminationist rhetoric and talk of banning gun-related words from public discourse in early 2011, I’m sure the MSM will eagerly go along, right?

“A random individual, unknown to the congressman, began screaming at him and grabbed his arm,” said spokeswoman Cassie Smedile in a Thursday morning statement. “Mr. Duffy was unharmed. He reported the incident in compliance with House security procedures. Congressman Duffy has requested no further action be taken and there will be no further comment on the matter at this time.”

The confrontation may have stemmed from frustration over the federal government shutdown, according to sources.

They told me if I supported the Tea Party, violent yahoos would be attacking members of Congress. And they were right!

Almost everyone else, even in the left-blogosphere, has given up on that claim. Loughner was a lunatic living in a nether world who had no obvious political motivation for the shooting. Indeed, Loughner was so out of it that he initially was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, a really tough standard.

Anecdotally, Loughner in his earlier years seemed to have liberal leanings according to people who knew him. He had no right-wing activism or connection, regardless of how broadly one defines “right wing.”

DEHUMANIZING ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: “[Anyone] who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting,” tweets Jim Carrey, in-between sparring with moviegoers on Twitter who disagree with his anti-Second Amendment viewpoint.

Presumably Carrey is wishing for his box office appeal to become increasingly “selective,” as Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith euphemistically explained his charges’ own declining popularity.

• Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

• Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

This kind of talk makes me want to buy an assault rifle. Or twelve. And really, dude, the fact that you’re angry doesn’t give you some sort of a pass from the norms of civil society. Or, if it does, be prepared to tolerate a lot of things that you’ll find intolerable. Because, you know, a lot of people are angry.

What amuses me is how so many of these people claim to be anti-violence and pacifistic until someone disagrees with them. Apparently it never occurs to them that these ideals can never be met until we learn to disagree without rancor. It’s a symptom of childishness to throw a tantrum when you don’t get your way.

That’s probably obvious, but it keeps happening and they never seem to get it. You can’t maintain a republic when there are too many people like that allowed to vote.

UPDATE: Reader Warren Bonesteel writes: “The ‘narrative’ is about making it socially acceptable to start killing Republicans and conservatives. This type of ‘narrative’ is always a precursor to such events, historically speaking.” We do seem to be hearing a lot of eliminationist rhetoric lately.

That’s right. They’re just hate-filled “eliminationist rhetoric” of the sort that lefties are always accusing people on the right of, but seem to engage in rather a lot themselves. Not a firing offense, but certainly worthy of widespread mockery.

Related thoughts from Joshua Trevino: “One could hardly defend Loomis and his record on the merits. Nevertheless, one can note that this might not be, well, justice. My only interactions with the man revealed him to be offensive and somewhat dim: he loathes Texas, is a rather pedestrian academic-left radical, and seems to have problems moderating his tone online. These are bad things. (And, reversing the ideological direction, it is not wholly unlike myself.) But they are not the whole man: and they don’t rise to the level, in my book, of wanting to render him bereft and ruined. . . .He earned his opprobrium, but not his destruction.”

UPDATE: Badger Pundit writes: “Nice post on Loomis. Especially classy after the Crooked Timber profs accused you of being the ‘witch hunt’ ringleader. The Crooked Timber profs aren’t exactly open to explaining what the heck is the ACADEMIC FREEDOM interest they’re defending (as Loomis’s tweets were part of his private life, i.e., not related to his academic field.)”

Ringleader? I never even mentioned his name, and I came to the story after lots of other people. But I’m used to bogus charges from the Crooked Timber gang. Which is why I hadn’t seen that, since I no longer read them.

But hey, if you want to argue that “head on a stick” isn’t any sort of eliminationist rhetoric, well, duly noted. (But if it was just a metaphor, what about the subsequent reference to settling for imprisonment for life? Is that some colorful metaphor that I’ve somehow missed?) Anyway, I’m sure that if someone makes a similar statement about Barack Obama, the Crooked Timber folks will rush to defend the colorful metaphor involved. Though certainly Sarah Palin was pilloried for metaphors that were far less colorful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Again, we see no attempt to silence; in fact, the ‘right-wing witch hunt’ arose from little more than (metaphorically) holding up a megaphone to Loomis’ existing speech.”

Plus, how Crooked Timber sanitized Loomis. “It turns out, by the way, that Crooked Timber also misled by omission. Everyone knows that the expression ‘head on a stick’ is a metaphor, and that is how Crooked Timber defended Loomis. But see here for some of his truly vile comments. Crooked Timber quoted none of these.””

The anti-NRA syllogism seems to work this way: (1) Something bad happened; (2) I hate you; so (3) It’s your fault. This sort of reasoning has played out in all sorts of places over the past century, with poor results. One would expect a history professor to know better.

UPDATE: John Steakley emails: “Civil war? So violence, decay, despair, filth and chaos in the streets while innocent people flee as fast as they can? In other words, Hoffa threatens that Detroit will look like . . . Detroit.”

Well Professor [Michael] Oppenheimer, back in the 60s, we called such people pigs. Pigs. No, really. They don’t care about the planet, they don’t care about the destruction of war. All they want is what they got, their stuff, and they want more of it.

Flash-forward an appearance by Maher on the October 7th edition of StarTalk Radio, a syndicated radio show hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson,who brought up the topic of the death penalty. Maher responded:

“I have a lot of ideas that you might consider conservative. But I feel like on that, I’m just consistent, like the pope is consistent. The pope is consistently pro-life; I’m consistently pro-death.

“I am for the death penalty, although I do believe in more DNA testing,” Maher continued. “My motto is, ‘Let’s kill the right people.’ I’m pro-choice. I’m for assisted suicide. I’m for regular suicide. I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving. That’s what I’m for.”

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus just held an impromptu press gaggle and said, “We’re going to outspend the DNC 10-to-1 for the next six weeks.” Asked about polls showing Romney-Ryan trailing in Ohio, Priebus said “we’re within a field goal and we’re going to crush [the Democrats] on the ground.”